The EA Forums now offer details on the promise of a free game to compensate SimCity owners for the botched launch of the urban planning sequel. Anyone with a registered copy of SimCity by the end of March 25th will be entitled to download one of the following games from Origin through March 30th:

Quboid wrote on Mar 18, 2013, 22:26:OK, now that RPS quote is applicable.

The complaint against always-online is more than just "does it work now". That last SimCity from 10 years ago still works. I could still play it. I could play it during an 8 hour flight if I wanted to. Will this SimCity work in 10 years time? I very much doubt it, because it's at the mercy of EA and at some point, they will switch off their server and then it is gone.

This move by EA (and Ubisoft and Blizzard) does nothing but take control away from us. Whether it's for data mining, DRM or whatever, this do so very little but make gaming worse.

I don't like that, I'm not going to silently take it. I want publishers to know that we, their customers, aren't inconvenient potential criminals, but that we're essential to their survival. I'm not alone.

Thank you, well put. How many previous SimCity games required a persistent internet connection? How many other SimCity games didn't let you experiment as you wanted? Which other SimCity entries didn't allow you to save and load? The gameplay justifications for these things are dubious at best and they haven't resulted in a better product for the fans. People seem to forget that for the majority of this games development it was an offline title with optional multiplayer functionality. It was only in the last 11 months that they changed course due to direction from management at EA. The product vision comments from PR reps are meaningless, it was not designed that way originally and the changes aren't beneficial to anyone but EA.